‘A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again’ is a 100-page essay written by David Foster Wallace in 1997 about a week he spent alone aboard a cruise ship. It is very funny and highly accurate, I’m told, though I have no first-hand experience to measure it up against. Once you’ve read ‘A Supposedly Fun Thing…’, you aren’t exactly inclined to rush towards the docks, you see — and as a PR move the whole exercise (Foster Wallace was originally invited on a complimentary press trip) has done for cruises what Prince Harry has done for the bearded community.
This, along with the general floating-buffet energy of the whole thing — not to mention memories of that tipsy Italian captain who crashed the ‘Costa Concordia’ — mean that what is actually a pretty good idea (a hotel that transports you to new cities/islands while you sleep) tends to feature on very few start-of-the-year travel bucket lists.
But with a slight tweak of perspective, a slight adjustment in language, things might be very different in 2023: a year that some commentators (or this one, at least) are already calling the Year of the Floating Hotel.
Take Kempinski, the famed Swiss-German hotelier, whose aptly-named Floating Palace launches in Dubai later this summer. It is a thing of design intrigue — a sort of Nikki Beach-meets-Thunderbirds chic — which surely deserves a Bond movie cameo.
There’s a vast central hub in the middle with a docking space for superyachts, as if the Death Star was populated by oligarchs, and, most ingeniously, perhaps, 12 mobile luxury outer villas which can detach from the main structure and jaunt away to private coves or clearer waters.
The hotel-proper, anchored off Jumeirah Beach, has 156 rooms and suites, while the outer villas are two-storey pads of four bedrooms a piece, with infinity pools, roof terraces and their very own skipper and crew.
‘Guntû’, meanwhile, is a more boutique affair. A nimbler vessel, this one cuts about the Seto Inland sea between the Honshū, Shikoku, and Kyūshū islands of Japan. It is, perhaps, a slightly more wholesome option than its Gulf counterpart.
The name references the nickname of a local crab, while the 19 cabins — designed by architect Yasushi Horibe — are built with specific grains and shades of wood to maximise tranquillity and relaxation. The freshly-caught fish — served in the light-filled dining room — is prepared in accordance with local sushi menus and no doubt treated with the same tenderness and expertise as the guests themselves.
Floating off the Pemba Islands (itself a little ocean paradise off the coast of Tanzania), the Manta Resort Kwanini boasts a honeymoon suite with a serious ocean view — one that takes place partially below the water line. Anchored in an ‘ocean floor anomaly’ known locally as the Blue Hole, the Swedish-engineered floating apartment has three levels, including a handsome, modern lounge and a roof deck built for stargazing.
But it’s below the surface that things get truly interesting in a remarkable turquoise bedroom wallpapered, so to speak, with hundreds of multicolored reef fish.
In colder climes, Arctic Bath is a giant bird’s nest of a structure moored off the coast of Swedish Lapland. Frozen into the river ice during winter, it is a monument to all that is great about northern Scandinavia — an ultra-hygge combination of fur-and-wood rooms, traditional saunas and open-air plunge pools, where husky-drawn sleds lead you to reindeer encounters under pearlescent skies.
Similarly, Canada’s King Pacific Lodge is a beautiful eco-resort which bobs on the edge of the Great Bear rainforest under some of the clearest skies on the planet. You reach it by a short sea-plane flight from Bella Bella, and the entire place has the air of splendid isolation — a hotel so in tune with its surroundings that humpback whales surface and frolic unperturbed in the bay.
Alongside this nano-continent, a series of 131 futuristic Floating Seahorse villas nestle in the bays around the Heart of Europe nexus, with below-sea level decks and climate-controlled outdoor areas — buoyant serviced apartments as opposed to floating hotels. It is a spiritual cousin of the ambitious ArkHAUS fleet of ultra high-end private members’ club — a far-flung constellation of modular, solar-electric, yacht-ish structures, whose flagship Miami club (opening spring 2023) will be followed by ones in New York, California, Dubai, Istanbul and Paris.
Though leaning heavily on history, The Heart of Europe’s Venice project points starkly to a new future in luxury, where a certain cadre of travelers crave the best of old-world architecture and, for want of a better word, vibes, but with none of the rough edges or constraints. (The Kempinski Floating Palace is topped with a grand glass pyramid; a backwards nod to the Louvre Paris, which itself nods, of course, to the Egyptian pyramids of antiquity.)
This is the cruise ship mentality taken to its most extravagant conclusion: a sort of grand buffet of world heritage; a cultural, smooth-edged pick-and-mix. Where is David Foster Wallace when you need him?
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